Make Ahead Packed Lunches: Sausage & Egg Salad

Make ahead packed lunches are made just 1-2x a week and chucked into the fridge – all you have to do is grab one as you leave the house.  Although you don’t have to be leaving the house, these are a great way to make sure somebody in your house has always got something they can grab and eat on a whim.

Sausage and egg salad is one of the best packed lunches you can make ahead as it’s so quick and easy, yet tasty and a welcome treat.  Much better than just plain cheese I figure!  It’s also a great pitta bread filling.

Ingredients:

• Cold, cooked sausages, let’s say a packet of 8, 450 grams or so, sliced in any direction you prefer
• Cold, boiled eggs, sliced or cut up rough
• Green salad of your choice, and a pitta bread if you’re using this as a pitta filling
• Sauce of your choice.

You can buy ready-cooked cocktail sausages at supermarkets, or make your own by frying or oven-baking them.  Once cooked, sausages can be frozen, so it can be a good idea to cook a whole pack at a time, with the unused sausages going into the fridge and/or the freezer.  For a pitta bread filling I use 1.5 sausages/pitta bread, or 7-8 cocktail sausages/pitta.

Boiled eggs can be made by boiling eggs in water in a saucepan, or by using a microwave egg boiler – I’ve got two of these!  Once boiled, you can keep hard boiled eggs in the fridge for 1-2 weeks in their shells!

Pitta bread comes in a variety of shapes/sizes and colours at supermarkets, everything from the tiny pitta breads to large floppy pitta.

Sauce of your choice can be brown sauce, ketchup, curry sauce, chilli sauce, sweet chilli sauce or even just chutney that you’ve got in the cupboard and never seem to get round to using!  You can use any favourite sauce that you think goes with sausage/egg!

Method:

1. Slice your sausages into small pieces – you can make them as large, or small, as you like
2. Boil, cool, shell and slice your boiled eggs.
3. Grab a handful of green salad – I keep green salad in the salad spinner in the fridge for this purpose.
4. If you’re using pitta breads, then toast the pitta and slit them open – I used to make nice side slits, now I just cut the top straight off and scoff the bit I cut off 🙂  Squirt any sauce on the inside of the pitta.
5. Place the green salad in a sandwich box, or in your pitta
6. Load up with slices of sausage and egg.
7. Splash your favourite sauce on top.
8. If you’re using pitta, then wrap the pitta bread snugly in tin foil and place it in the fridge!  A nice grab bag.

Use within 3-4 days.

This packed lunch idea is great because you could just make up your packed lunches ahead of time just twice a week!  They’re also a great grab-and-go food to keep in the fridge for the summertime when you need a quick picnic or food for the beach, rather than wasting valuable time when the sun’s out and you just want to dash out.

Xmas Leftovers:

This can also be a great way to use up any Xmas leftovers if you still have too many cocktail sausages, or buffet salad, in the fridge!

Menu Cost: The cost of everything is variable, but you can pick up packs of 8 sausages for £1, eggs at £0.08 each and small pitta breads from about £0.24 for six.  Making up six small pitta breads filled with sausage and egg, with a splash of sauce, can cost as little as £0.25-£0.30 each.